«I had it in my head that development credit and bad credit could have many synergies between them and at a certain point the NPL market collapsed». Corrado Passera he spoke in Milan at the National Council of the Bankers’ Union FABI critically rethinking the experience of Illimity Bank, of which he was the founder.
That credit project – the banker recalled – had been made possible bytechnological innovation which in recent years has changed the operating scenario of the banking world, overshadowing the efficiency lever represented by the size of the company.
«Up to a certain point, objectively, the size of the banks was the fundamental lever. Then came the internet, mobile, but above all the cloud and for a certain moment it happened that banks, even small to medium ones, could have computing capacity, quality of services, economies of scale comparable to large ones. And in that moment — Passera continued — I felt like saying: let’s create a bank specialized in credit.”
Then, however, the difficulties in NPL market they proved fatal for his creature and, recently, size has once again become a winning asset.
«It’s likely – Passera said — that for the investments necessary to be competitive on the market, both technological and personnel, size is again, I won’t say indispensable, but very necessary. If we then add the issue of sovereignty and how we find ourselves with relatively small banks compared to the large ones in the USA and China also for this reason, we should do everything to encourage the creation of a certain number of very large banks”.
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